


All You Are

by Euregatto



Category: Book of Life (2014)
Genre: Drama & Romance, F/M, M/M, Short Story, not liking this one that much but hey, spy assassin soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-23 03:00:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2531597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euregatto/pseuds/Euregatto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re walking train wrecks, living on heartbeats that defy their existence and deny their dreams, cleaving their own legacies into the stone wall of history. Names to be forgotten in the shroud of the past, already decided by the pages they have burned out of their life stories.</p><p>It’s a shame, really, how they weren't always good people.<br/> </p><p>- Manolo, Maria, Joaquin. / The Spy. The Assassin. The Soldier.</p><p>- Modern AU / Concept short story</p>
            </blockquote>





	All You Are

**Spy** (n):  a person who keeps close and secret watch on the actions and words of another or others.

 **Assassin** (n):  a murderer, especially one who kills a politically prominent person for fanatical or monetary reasons.

 **Soldier** (n):  a person who serves in an army; a person engaged in military service.

 

 

~

 

 

He had spent a long time trying to decipher the meaning behind the paths each of them had taken in life. He rationalized that there was a gorge separating them: one, the assassin, a stealthy murderer with falsified identities masking and merging with the truth; one to become enlisted straight out of high school into the military, a soldier, who only kills upon command and for good reason; then him, the spy out of shady recruitment, who does not kill, not if he can avoid it.

But that is all a lie.

He sees now that he’s been searching for the differences that have carved leagues of years between them, desecrating and defining their fractured friendship… that they have become hollowed shells that incinerated their innocence and devoured any purity they had once retained. But he realizes now that they have never been drawn any closer. Like tugging two fault lines back into place with duct tape and a promise.

They are killers, by choice or no choice or reflexive action. It’s the only cruel, cruel fact that has given them any meaning to each other anymore.

They’re walking train wrecks, living on heartbeats that defy their existence and deny their dreams, cleaving their own legacies into the stone wall of history. Names to be forgotten in the shroud of the past, already decided by the pages they have burned out of their life stories. They’ve always been this way, even as children, even when they all first met on preschool playgrounds. Growing up and parting, crossing, treading along and stumbling down separate paths has not changed that.

Regret has, but he thinks that they’ve had their chance, and they all chose to follow the more erroneous signs.

He can’t say that they were ever falling apart, though – only that they were missing a few key pieces. Pieces, like memories or tragedies or freak collisions and too many late nights under rented motel rooms. Little mishaps that have shaped them like carving statues out of wood or chiseling limestone into figurines, far from perfect, yet reformed in the eyes of perfection. Minuscule, forgettable, _important_ events that have been knocked loose from the puzzle of their existences as little blips on a featureless Earth.

Pieces that have interlocked, connecting them, linking them to the right here and the right now.

They’ve always been a trio, together, like the musketeers, with villainous methods of expressing the weary tenderness in their hearts to one another. And even now, they are what they were perhaps born not to become, but still fate has conjured into a clusterfuck of conspiracies and cover-ups that veil their decisions in mystery, but they have loved one another in a way that life has not allowed for. It’s a shame, really, how they weren’t always good people.

He told himself that despite all of this – every last moment that has driven his life straight through brick walls and into raging rivers – that they would be together. They will always find a way to come together again, even if they didn’t deserve such satisfaction or fruition.

He justifies that that kind of irony is why they are at a three way standstill, the barrels of their individual weapons aimed for the other two.

Manolo finds himself staring down Maria’s silencer and Joaquin’s pistol, while he keeps both revolvers glaring dangerously at their foreheads, and Maria’s side arm is rivaling Joaquin’s Desert Eagle. There’s logical reasoning for why this has happened to _them_ , of all the people in such a disconsolate world – the pieces and the lies and the winding routes that have picked them apart and broken them down until every star in the universe aligned to ram their roads together, right here, _right now_.

Sick, _sick_ irony.

The story of the soldier who learned of the death of his general through the hands of an assassin to keep him quiet about a conspiracy only the spy knows anything about. The soldier, framed and dishonored now, tasked with killing the assassin and pulling the spy out of the rabbit hole. The assassin tasked with tying up all loose ends with the soldier she involved and the mole they know about. The spy tasked with burying them both ten feet in the ground where this whole conspiracy belonged.

_They were fucked from the beginning._

They have never been so quiet, either. There is a respect about it, almost, as if they all knew this would happen eventually. The probability of three trains colliding at the crossroad, head on, full speed, with the same time schedule.

“Hello, Manolo. Hello, Joaquin.”

Maria - if that's even her real name anymore - has always been gentle at heart but sharp with her words, as if she could spit daggers through her teeth. To become an assassin-for-hire would have never fit the bill, not in this lifetime, at least. But she was trained by a well-paying organization to become a bodyguard, of sorts, hand selected for her excellence in combat experience and lethal handling of weapons. Something had broken free within her spirit, something changed, something devoured her amiable nature. She became unrecognizable to them, but retained her aura of grace, still Maria yet not Maria, all at once. A perfect assassin. A perfect murderer, haunted by her past as if not fazed by it at all.

“Hey babe.”

Joaquin was destined to be the soldier. He traces his father’s footsteps while managing to leave his own in the sands in his wake. He bears his heart of gold, his guts of iron, his fists of led and truth before his standing place amongst the ranks. To think he is exactly where he wanted to wind up, where he strived to be – it’s inspiring, almost. Perhaps Manolo and Maria wish to have been more like him, and discovered themselves before the governments fed them through the system. Maybe they wouldn't be here. Maybe Joaquin wouldn't be the only one with a life worth living.

“Please don’t play this off with formalities.”

Manolo should have never been a spy, but through a series of circumstances that dot across the last five years of his life, and his own natural knack for keeping promises, secrets, and altering reality to deny the happening of either, he has found a perfect place in the world for himself. Delving into internet archives on stolen time, utilizing manipulation to creep through ranks, pretending that he does not attach himself to the friends he is a traitor to. He hates it, sometimes. He hates it now, especially.

One of them will act first. One will hesitate to pull the trigger. And both will realize that Manolo will never fire because he doesn’t want it to end like this. Not like **_this_**. _Never like this_.

It's a puzzle. An enigma broken into inquiries about theories and formulas for equations no one has ever pondered yet. There is no meaning to how the world revolves, sometimes. There is only anguish, apathy, and no reason for any of it… you just have to _suffer_. It is as simple as that, for torment is universal. Sometimes people must writhe with discomfort and months of grueling distress together, sharing a fate worse than death at the hands of the ones they loved most vindictively.

_(Late nights in musky hotel rooms beneath the melodic strums of guitar strings, ordered meals to go under false names with blood-soaked money, three sets of limbs tangled in sheets on beds that smell like paltry soaps, the roughness of chin stubble and grinding of nails and gasps and cries and forbidden charades)_

“We never should have fallen in love,” Joaquin remarks, his gruff tone punching holes through the deafening silence encasing them. “You’ve made this harder for me than it should have been.”

Manolo presses his lips into a thin line, considering it, because Joaquin’s right. They were wrong for submitting to their desires, believing that for every heartbeat they endured the world could not touch them or scathe them with words and barely dodged bullets, and now he is right for admitting to such foolish behaviors. For being the only one of them to have attempted to do justice on a hopelessly decaying planet.

Manolo swallows the rock in his throat, hesitates. And then smiles. “But do you regret it?”

“I don’t,” Joaquin replies promptly. A split second later both weapons are whipped towards the floor, as if begrudgingly surrendering to their weight. “Not now, not ever. Do you?”

“No,” Maria whispers, the tears glazing over her eyes. Following Joaquin’s lead, she lowers her guns. “I’m so, so sorry this ever happened to us… I love you both so much.”

“But at least we won’t have to suffer anymore.” They watch him retract his revolvers, but he moves one to the base of his temple, the nose prodding dangerously against the thin veil of flesh. “I don’t want to do this to you,” he tells them quietly, his hitched breaths amplifying the suffocating desolation of this abandoned room. “We’ve gotten ourselves into quite a bit of a mess... but I don’t see anything left in this world without the promise of you both in it.”

“Final words of real men,” Joaquin says snidely. A split second later, he turns his attention to his musician of a best friend. Then his Desert Eagle snaps up to touch the side of his brow. “I never wanted to do this.”

“I never wanted to hurt either of you,” Maria mutters, her silencer pressing to her temple. ”I never, ever wanted any of this to happen. Will you both forgive me?”

Manolo’s smile broadens. “Of course.”

“You know we do,” Joaquin relays, forefinger grasping the trigger.

“It’s a shame, really,” Maria adds now, quivering, regretting _this_ but not _them_ , “that we weren't always good people. Maybe then we would have been allowed to live together in this world.”

And with that final promise, they pull their triggers.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

_“So you’re telling me you never loaded your guns?”_

Manolo sits at a café with his informant on the other side of his cell phone, the sunlight streaming warmth onto his face. He picks at the old strings of his guitar, sugarcoating the blissful fingers of wind that rake through his hair, the scent of city air and the renewal of life in his veins. “Yeah,” he answers after a brief pause, absently tilting into his chair. “I didn’t want to kill them, so I didn’t load the bullets in my revolvers. I figured that it’d be a blessing if they shot me first.”

_"And you got them to pull the triggers on themselves instead?"_

"Yes."

_“You’re a crazy sonofabitch, kid.”_

“Sir.”

_“When you return, I have another assignment for you. But until then, why don’t you relax and take some time off? I’ll see you soon.”_

He strums his strings again as the call disconnects.

Across from him, two sets of curious eyes peer at him from over their menus. “He thinks we’re dead?” Maria inquires, gazing at him hopefully, and when Manolo nods, she exhales her held breath. “It’s a good thing none of us loaded our guns then, huh?”

Joaquin grins at the thought. “We got off lucky, then. So what next?”

“We go after the men who set us up,” Manolo answers as he tosses the pre-paid phone into the trash bin nearby, “and we make everything right again, once and for all.”

He had spent a long time trying to decipher the meaning behind the paths each of them had taken in life, but in the end, when the roads had smashed them all back together again, Manolo realizes that there is no meaning to be analyzed.

There is only right here, right now, and everything they choose to do to make up for what they've done.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed~  
> I had scrapped this idea a while back, but after looking more into the lives of spies, assassins, and soldiers, I decided to roll with it again. The criteria for writing this was based on text-book definitions of each. And I just really, really wanted to do something for the pairing, but by the time I finished the concept short story I didn't feel like adding anymore. *shrug*
> 
> And if you enjoyed this, you should check out my other short, La Batalla.


End file.
